Hello, all you Lispers out there. At only age 13, I am a very young Lisper. You all probably have more experience. Here is my story.

I started with JavaScript. The first time I tried something, however, I had so much trouble figuring out which function to use, where to put it, etc. I turned to the world of Lisp, with the promise of more time learning it, but also the promise of never forgetting a function, because I got to define them. My current problem is to figure out which dialect to use. I don't prefer the setup of emacs, though. If you prefer emacs, you may as well stop reading and go to another topic. On a lighter note, I am starting to figure out how the forum works.

Pick one and run with it; if you don't like it you can always switch later, and a lot of what you learned will still apply.

I've been focusing my learning efforts on Common Lisp because it's big and flexible. It lets me program how I like. I do like recursion and elegant code, but I don't worship them. I've marvelled at functional programming, but I don't always want to do it. However, I'll probably make the effort to pick up Scheme and Haskell (admittedly a non-lisp) at some point. I guess I won't even bother mentioning Emacs Lisp...

I would recommend spending a little time with How To Design Programs which is based on the Scheme dialect ("DrScheme" to be precise). It will probably start out a little too simplistic given your experience level, but it is quick way to get started without have to learn a lot of different library functions and looping constructs.

I'm aware I'm answering a very old (and not very active) thread, but I've recently gone through much the same question myself. I was exposed to scheme a few decades back in my schooling, have been fond of lisp since then, and a few months ago I decided I'd get proficient enough with some variant of lisp to pick up a few contract jobs as I encounter them.

Here's what I came up with:

If you're interested in a modern, cutting edge lisp, with a fanatically active developer community, I'd go with Clojure. If you're interested in solid workhorse lisp, with built-in functions to do virtually anything, I'd go with Common Lisp. If you're just interested in learning the lisp approach to programming, I'd go with Common Lisp, Scheme, or Clojure (play with them all, and take your pick).